May you never steal, lie or cheat. But if you must steal, then steal away my sorrows. And if you must lie, lie with me all the nights of my life. And if you must cheat, then please cheat death, because I couldn’t live a day without you.
Are you going to take a leap of faith this Leap Day and pop the question to your better but somewhat slower half??
The right of every women to propose on 29th February each leap year, goes back many hundreds of years to when the leap year day had no recognition in English law (the day was ‘lept over’ and ignored, hence the term ‘leap year’).
It was considered, therefore, that as the day had no legal status, it was reasonable to assume that traditions also had no status.
Consequently, women who were concerned about being ‘left on the shelf’ took advantage of this anomaly and proposed to the man they wished to marry.
It was also thought that since the leap year day corrected the discrepancy between the calendar year of 365 days and the time taken for the Earth to complete one orbit of the sun (365 days and 6 hours), it was an opportunity for women to correct a tradition that was one-sided and unjust.
